 | | Sir Richard Branson Founder and President of the Virgin Group
In 1970, Richard founded Virgin as a mail order record retailer, and not long after he opened a record shop in Oxford Street, London. Since then, Virgin has become one of the world's most recognized and respected brands and has expanded into aviation, hospitality and leisure, telecommunications, financial services, health and wellness, and clean energy through more than 200 companies worldwide, employing approximately 50,000 people in 29 countries. In December 1999, Richard was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's Millennium New Year's honours list for "services to entrepreneurship." Richard is the author of "Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way," (Crown Business, 1998) "Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons in Life" (Virgin Books, 2006), and "Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur" (Virgin Books, 2008). |
 | | Dick Costolo Chief Operating Officer, Twitter
Dick is the Chief Operating Officer at Twitter where he is responsible for monetization and the day to day operations of the business. He was previously cofounder and CEO of FeedBurner, a digital content syndication platform that was acquired by Google in the summer of 2007. At Google, Dick was Group Product Manager on the Ads team responsible for social media ads. Costolo spent most of the 90's in Chicago founding and running two other digital media companies and performing in multiple productions with the acclaimed Annoyance Theater. Dick holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. |
 | | Andy Sernovitz Author, Word of Mouth Marketing
Andy Sernovitz teaches word of mouth marketing. He's the author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. His company, GasPedal, teaches word of mouth techniques, and runs the Social Media Business Council, a peer-to-peer support group for the pioneers of social media at very large organizations. He also teaches at Northwestern University. In addition, he taught Internet Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business, ran a business incubator, and started half a dozen companies. He created the Word of Mouth Marketing Association around the latest revolutions in blogs, buzz, and word of mouth, and in the dot com days ran the Association for Interactive Marketing. His fantastic blog is called Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That. |